Catch up and go! 1.

There is nose to tail cooking and then, in my case, nose to concrete bashing. Not long ago, I tripped on my way into the Victoria&Albert Museum and I fell on my face, full force. Look no hands. This is one explanation for the gap in my posts. Fearing that the pavement would rise up and smash against me I nevertheless took my bruises and frog swollen mouth and nose to shows in London and, why stop there, in Florence and Amsterdam. At least the kind of art I go to see can't see whose looking. So this is my first catch up post. There's lots of time left to see them all.

Opal, ruby and opalescent quartz scent bottle

The Cheapside Hoard at the Museum of London. (read what I wrote in The Economist published October 12 ).  Here I will just say that this is the first time since the hoard was found in 1912 that all of is on view. There are  500 jewels, gems and luxury objects --among them a little enamelled gold watch set in a pretty big and very beautiful bluey green emerald.

This is the largest collection of Elizabethan  and Jacobean jewellery anywhere and it is extremely well displayed. The story of the discovery and of the sometimes dodgy practices of goldsmiths in 16th and 17th centuries --ignoring the law among them-- is vividly told by curator Hazel Forsyth in "London's Lost Jewels" which complements the show. (There should be but there is not a catalogue with images and descriptions of all the objects.)  One of the prettiest pieces is the enamelled gold, opal and ruby scent bottle at the top. One of the most fascinating is the what remains of a watch made in Geneva probably between 1610 and 1620 signed by Gaultier Ferlite. The makers of all the other objects in the horde remain unknown. Forsyth has dated to the burial of these treasures to sometimes after 1640 and before the Fire of London in 1666  

Old China; New Japan: Two stars of Asian Art in London

Auspicious Cranes about 1112

Auctions, museum exhibition, lectures, gallery selling shows some by dealers who temporarily take over premises in the center of London offer more Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian art each November than anyone, except maybe the most determined collector, can see and certainly more than I know enough about to appreciate. I did not see everything, not nearly. But the outings that meant a lot to me were "Masterpiece's of Chinese Paintings," at the Victoria &Albert Museum and  "Reflecting Nature," a selling exhibition in Cork Street (Mayfair), staged by private dealer Simon Pilling
   The 80 Chinese paintings at the V&A  date from 700 to 1900.  In addition to the pleasure of gazing on their works there is the amazement, yet again, of the sophistication; the vision and accomplishment of Chinese Artists in the 12th and 13th centuries when, by comparison, Europeans were illuminating manuscripts with sometimes vivid and beautiful but comparatively primitive works. Then as the great Italian artists of the Renaissance emerge--Titian, Raphael, Veronese--the Chinese decline and continue to decline until we arrive at the free for all that is 21st art everywhere.  This evidence of such cycles of genius, like those of prosperity and power, is bracing--reassuring and unnerving.

The objects made by 30 year-old SASAKI Gakuto on view in "Reflecting Nature," are 21st century alright but seem outside the free for all that is global contemporary art. The artist, who teaches and works in Tokyo, is on a journey of his own==surreal, humorous and technically prodigious. His pieces-boxes, like those below-- look like the sort of luxury goods you might find at places like Dunhill --if they strayed from the conventional. But pick one up, open the box and the surprise is electric. These are not snakeskin covered leather objects that zip open; they are fabulous lacquer objects. He has applied layer upon layer of lacquer using exquisite control and technique to create in superb detail the look and texture of both reptile skin and metal zips. It is a honey of show...Prices from 3,000 to 5,000 pounds sterling. Covetable.

The Munich paintings: A happy ending? If only.

There is a triumphalist tone in some reports of the recovery of something like 1500 works of art in the Munich apartment of the aged, reclusive son of a Nazi era art dealer. Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times finds it an occasion to cheer that art will "trump even humanity’s most demonic ambitions."  I can understand the excitement; the thrill of finding works like these horses by Blue Rider artists Franz Marc, since my teens one of my favorite painters; works which were thought to have been lost forever. In some accounts it seems that Hildebrand Gurlitt or his widow told authorities that his collection (plus or minus the art he amassed for Goebbels with Hitler's museum at Linz as shall we call it a final destination) were destroyed in the 1945 fire bombing of Dresden. It is exciting to discover that they were not. I long to see them. It can't be anything but good that they survive. But let's get a grip;  Hitler was defeated by his decision to take on the Soviet Union; by his human enemies, their weapons and grit. He was stopped but by the time he was stopped the holocaust had happened. The murder of millions and the destruction of entire civilizations was not trumped, not by 1500 works of art or anything else.  It is moving even thrilling when objects believed destroyed by war turn out to have survived.  Open the champagne but please let's drop the conceit that this is some kind of fairy tale happy ending; that art has the power to make up for, TO TRUMP no less, the vile behavior of men towards their fellows in the past and today.

Size matters or when big is too big and too small is just right

Let's get this over with fast: Paul Klee (1879-1940) painted small pictures. The rooms (do I have to call them spaces) in Tate Modern were not designed with small in mind. They were intended for painters and sculptors creating for museums not places where people live.  "Red green and Violet-Yellow" painted in 1920 is immediately attractive, even pretty, But sit alone with it for half an hour and worlds open up. Fat chance of doing that in this place. The painting is 14 3/4 by 13 1.4 inches (37.5 by 33.7 cm.) -a stretched out one-foot square. This is not a miniature but it looks like one on the walls of Tate Modern. In fact it looks like a postage stamp. The whole show looks like a line up of 3-D stamp albums.  "Revelatory," calls this show. They want us to pay more attention to Klee. 

The artist was slow to find his way until 1911 when he became attached to the Blue Rider group in Munich. See my story "Eye Music" about the Blue Riders in 25 May issue of The Economist .But what really gave him the push to be the Paul Klee we know--or might like to know better if we could concentrate on the works, was his visit to Tunisia in 1914. He and color fell in love. That is when he knew painting was for him.
   This show does not help; it undermines. Either it should have been staged in a more intimate place or a small, cozier space should have been built inside that hulking cavern. Which brings me to Whistler.












There is no one size that James Abbott Macneill Whistler (1834-1903) favored but many of the works on view in "Whistler and the Thames," at the Dulwich Picture Gallery range from sketches smaller than a sheet of paper to paintings you could easily tuck under one arm.  The museum's limited special- exhibition space, two modest rectangles connected by a long narrowish corridor are just the right for the size and scale for these often moody, poetic works; the drawings for them and the Japanese prints that inspired him.
"Nocturne: Blue and Gold--Old Battersea Bridge," (1872-79) to the left, was painted about a dozen years after the American settled in London.  It measures about 36 by 30 inches. "Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea" (1871-2) measures 24 by 13 inches.  You get the idea. These rooms are not so small that the pictures looked cramp or the viewer gets claustrophobic. Instead they and their proportions, and for that matter with all the numbers that have already appeared here, 

you forget all that sort of stuff and just look and wonder and envy Whistler a little too, his walks along the river; the models dressed in Japanese kimonos with cherry blossom branches strewn on the balcony overlooking the Thames; fishermen drinking in "The Angel" at Bermondsey; London a port and the Thames crowded with working boats. "The Pool," 1859 just east of London Bridge. Go out to Dulwich--it is worth the trip which they claim takes only 20 minutes. You will quickly enter Whistler's world--and the river at whatever time of day and season. It is a lovely show. And if you can't make it, the accompanying book is a treat. In addition to all the paintings, etchings and sketches there are photographs of the river and London's riverside and one of Whistler at work; against one wall  is propped a larger than life-sized portrait of his lover Maud Franklin. His studio had plenty of space for such a work. Dulwich is picture perfect for Whistler's Thames.